As I come to the end of Fleur Jaeggy's Last Vanities, 1994, tr. Tim Parks, I want to say a quick thing about the sixth piece in the book, The Twins, which achieves something that the other stories are chasing with less success. The style itself is quick march or blast-blast-blast, inserting the next idea directly ahead of you and letting you walk into it as if the story is a path that you are condemned to follow once you are set in place. Twins is different from the work of Robert Walser, which it resembles slightly, in that Jaeggy places things impatiently, not politely, but like him she will find an idea in or around whatever she has just written – it does not have to be the point of what she has written, only a stray thought or a word. She will uphold the enough-ness of a hint.
On the first page she mentions a cemetery.
A notice warns: Do not touch the flowers. In the German-speaking regions of the Alps flowers bud and bloom in furious haste, only to wither slowly, lazily. They too seem unhappy about strangers, for they change colour at the approach of eyes from another world, as if seized by frenzy. When the hay is gathered in, all the meadow flowers are mowed down, perhaps prematurely. Having snipped off some stalks and made them at home in a glass under the glare of an electric light, a poet compared their demeanor and gesturing to the abandonment of Saint Teresa as imagined by Bernini.
After a while a pastor comes in, travelling up to the Alpine town to do something – you learn that he is going to conduct a funeral service for a St Bernard. He shouts "Pagans!" Then we have the pastor's wife and a taxidermy owl that she buys because no one in Chur will stuff her dead cat. The word "owl" seems to come from nowhere, like "St Bernard"; for she is buying a stuffed something (the author has already followed this dead cat idea to a taxidermist's, now what?) and the something needs to be identified as a kind of thing. This is not the sort of writing in which objects are not named. So some noun is necessary, an animal noun because it had to be able to die, and some animal small enough for an average-sized Swiss-German woman to carry away from the shop by herself.
There is this idea of words being compelled to occur in the middle of the strict style, but it happens rather vaguely, as if the apparent confidence of the voice is all on the surface and underneath it is not sure of what it wants, exactly: why shouldn't it still have gone on if this had not been an owl.
Jaeggy is compelled to thrust against the Teutonic nuclear family in her stories again and again, which gives her a slight Jelinek smell. The pastor's wife is the latest sufferer. Her husband is saying "Pagans!" in the direction of the Twins, but now that the wife's misery has become accessible to the author she veers onto it for a while, going through the cat, the owl, sustaining the now-familiar repressive-family theme like that. (It's disappointing that she doesn't completely forget the Twins since it would have underlined her determination.)
What is this story getting at, you ask yourself; a meaning or point of view seems present yet evasive though you have a sense of it being there strongly somewhere because the author (in translation) is so plain, as if she is laying down facts that should not be avoided. The story itself is an action that gets you into the air.
Let me add that on Saturday evening I went to see a poet. When someone in the audience asked her to describe "your inspiration" she told us that the letter in the poem she had just read had been sent to her by a friend who used one word twice, close together (as we had noticed while she was reading it aloud). As soon as she encountered that replication, she said, she felt so happy with it that she had to find a reason to show it to the rest of the world. Then she wrote the poem as if she were putting a frame around a picture, though the ostensible story it had been made to describe was the afterlife of her dead mother.
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Your thoughts about how Jaeggy got to the owl are interesting. I'm reading some letters of Dylan Thomas and he makes a distinction between writing from words and writing toward words: from words means you have your vocabulary and favorite phrases and ways of writing, and you find subjects to fit what language you possess; toward words means you have some imagined thing you need to express, and you have to find language to fit what image you possess.
ReplyDeleteI certainly understand where the poet on Saturday was coming from. I'm currently writing a very long novel which is essentially an elaborate frame around two sentences from Emerson. The frame's become so elaborate that it might no longer need the Emerson, but I doubt it.
I like that. Which collection of Thomas' letters are you reading? Jaeggy's way of working in Vast seems fundamentally Romantic to me: the idea that the artist's products rise up from a deep internal well supposes that the well is already there, and so the work itself has to take the form of a search, or it needs to position itself so that a release can take place once the bubbled-up inspiration arrives. There's some version of this in the words of authors who say their characters "speak to them."
DeleteIs that (looking at your second paragraph)the way you usually work?
I'm reading Selected Letters of Dylan Thomas edited by Constantine Fitzgibbon, who wrote that biography of Thomas in 1965. This collection of letters came out in 1966, and mostly presents his ideas on poetry. Thomas as a young dog reminds me of young Chekhov: the same awareness of personal genius, the same insecurities, the same urge to have a strong opinion on every subject under the sun. Ah, youth.
DeleteThe novel I'm currently writing began as an offhand remark that I'd never have been on any of the famous English Antarctic expeditions except by accident. That idea sat in the back of my mind for years until I picked up a volume of Emerson and knew I had to write something in response, and somehow became the idea of Antarctica, and being there by mistake, became a framing story around Mr Emerson. Usually what happens is I imagine a distinct image, mostly of people exhausted at the end of some experience, and I try to create a structure that contains that image. I build up the structure out of whatever I'm thinking/reading/observing while writing it, so every novel is a sort of collage of my world at the time, that I try to internalize and find language to describe. I don't quite understand inspiration. I make pastiches, I think, and often détournements. More labor that creativity, very likely. An explanation of my scanty publishing history, that.
Those things you're describing are inspiration though. Whatever convinces you to make something is inspiration. It doesn't matter what it is; it doesn't matter if it's the stupidest thing that anyone has ever thought. For how many hundreds of years were visual artists in Europe able to become "great," "masters," innovative, etc, when all they were being paid to make was yet another Last Supper, or Bathsheba in her bath?
ReplyDelete(That's an exaggeration, but still. The range of accepted themes was narrower.)
DeleteI guess I tend to think of inspiration in a more Romantic way, as the gods whispering secrets into the artist's ear, or the Muse Gently Touching the Soul of the Creative One, etc. A moment of transfiguration. What I get is more like, "Maybe I could do something with that. I wonder if it would be interesting and amusing to work it out." But yeah, so many masterpieces of world art, made on assignment.
ReplyDeleteThis morning, while putting pomade into my hair, I was thinking about art as craft, that not enough attention is paid to the idea that making art is learned much the same way that making cabinets is learned, that a novelist is a lot like a seamstress, most of us being journeymen seamstresses, hoping someday maybe to sew a masterwork. This idea was sparked by a recent article I read by a literary critic/professor who does not seem to have the faintest inkling of how an artist actually sits down and works on a piece of art. A critic of the Harold Bloom school. "Craft is for hacks," that sort of thing.
There's no reason to think that we can recognise those gods for what they are when they come, though; look at John Skelton, 1460-1529, whose persistent anthologisation can trace itself back to the day when he decided to eulogise Jane Scrope's sparrow.
Delete"Craft is for hacks" is some sort of cousin to the sentimental idea that dogs and cats have it easier than us because they can just be.